Chapter 5 - Sanskrit on Shagreen

Summary

In Chapter 5, I follow this lead further and demonstrate that one of the most prominent sites where this new aesthetic regime and its colonial history was articulated most forcefully was the nineteenth-century French novel. Discussing Jacques Rancière’s influential work on novels by Balzac and Flaubert and his suggestion of the new idea of literature emerging through the “democratic petrification” of writing, this chapter shows how the context of such a development in France was historically much wider than developments within its national borders. Instead of thinking the historicity of literature through Europe alone, this chapter shows how the literary sovereign shaped the central ideas of textualization and readability through colonial documents, translations, textual representation of the orient, and so on. This textual history is then embedded within larger registers of visuality in contemporary French cultures that extended the colonial paradigm further.